Challenges Predicting the Reliability and Performance of Ground Vehicles

One reason the U.S. automotive industry has seen their market share drop over the last few decades is due the lack of vehicle reliability. Similarly for the military, the excessive costs of the operations, maintenance, and support of its ground vehicles is largely due to a lack of system reliability. Why has both the defense and commercial industry had so many problems managing these costs? One of the reasons for the difficulty is due to the complexity of predicting the performance and reliability of a vehicle early in the design cycle, and over the vehicle's life. Another reason is our inability to predict vehicle usage over time. This talk will focus on the mathematical challenges of predicting a vehicle's reliability and performance, and how some are approaches these challenges. The discussion will include reliability-based design optimization, design under uncertainty, robustness, condition-based maintenance, and methods of handling large data sets and models.

David Gorsich, U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center